Hearts of Iron III lets you play the most engaging conflict in world history, World War 2, on all fronts as any country and through multiple different scenarios. Guide your nation to glory between 1936 and 1948 and wage war, conduct diplomacy and build your industry in the most detailed World War 2 game ever made.

20. mars

Due to podcat going across the pond to inspect the troops in the new world Johan has made a guest return into the Dev Diary world! Today we are learning more about what happened to the National Goals and why National Focus is so much better:

20. februar

Attention!The 13th Developer Diary for Hearts of Iron IV is now available here!

Today Dan "Podcat" Lind will be telling us more about how conscription changed from Hearts of Iron III (it's no longer only a number ticking up at a steady phase depending on your conscription laws). You should also make sure you prepare for war by training your troops and making sure they have equipment stacked for both training and battle situations.

Anmeldelser

— Dreamstation
"Paradox has done a tremendous job of making this complex design relatively easy to get into."

— Gamespot
"With incredible flexibility, freedom, and depth, this is a history buffs dream and should not be passed up if you are a fan of the genre."

— PCgameworld
"Serious wargamers are in for a real treat as the hardcore franchise returns for another go at the world's most terrible war."

— Gamespy
"Featuring a fully integrated combat model, a wide range of strategic and diplomatic options for your country, and an intuitive AI system, Hearts of Iron III is shaping up to be the best game in the series yet."

— Strategy Informer

Om dette spillet

Hearts of Iron III lets you play the most engaging conflict in world history, World War 2, on all fronts as any country and through multiple different scenarios. Guide your nation to glory between 1936 and 1948 and wage war, conduct diplomacy and build your industry in the most detailed World War 2 game ever made.
Features:

Play as any nation from 1936 to 1948, more than 150 countries to choose from.

Control the oceans with aircraft carriers, submarines and battleships and use your air force to defend your skies, support your naval and ground forces, and to bomb your enemies

Thousands of historically accurate real-world military commanders and politicians.

Realistic military command AI with unprecedented levels of interaction

In-depth diplomatic and political system.

Historical accuracy combined with an unparalleled level of freedom of choice

More than 10,000 land provinces makes the game five times more detailed than HoI2 and the most detailed depiction of World War 2 ever made.

Customize your divisions in detail with more than 20 types of brigades

New economic system makes it possible to buy weapons from abroad.

Mobilization and reserves gives the option of surprise attacks, Blitzkrieg made real.

Government-in-exile makes it possible to continue to struggle from abroad with underground movements and uprisings against the oppressing power.

Strategic warfare system makes it more important to defend the skies and oceans against foreign attacks; leaving cities open to enemy bombing will now be devastating.

A completely new intelligence system, with several types of intelligence sources, makes it possible to get information about enemy reserves and troop movements.

Assign troops to "theatres" on the map to fight two-front wars more successfully.

The new AI system and more detailed map will allow for more strategic decisions.

Flexible technology system with hundreds of categories, where major powers get their own unique attributes.

Aus 1936-peace remains but i now Reign supreme and my policy to keep peace is to prepare for war......

Aus 1937- still preparing for war..........

Aus 1938- New Zealand seemed very threating so we invaded and swifty eliminated the threat......

Aus 1939-Europe is at War and England has requested Aus join the Allies-we refuse...

Aus 1940-Aus has realised that Europe can no longer look after there colonies, Aus declares was on netherlands and the Allies and joins Japan and the Axis in the liberation of south east asia and the pacific from the Allied Tyranny....

Aus 1941-Papua, Indonesia are liberated with out opposition and French indochina invasion has begun.....

Aus 1942-Indochina, Siam and islands have been Liberated only Singapore and the phillipenes remain, the war in Europe is going well and USA joins the fight........

Aus 1943-We begin creating defences and a fleet, singapore has fallen to Japan and they have begun there invasion of the Philpenes, Russia is about to fall...

Aus-1944-We have taken pearl Harbor and invaded the US mainland it was a huge fail, India has fallen to the Japs, Russia holds on........

1945-Aus- Everything has gone to hell US have invaded france,Russia is beating back Japs and Germany.

1946-Aus-''They have taken the Germany and the Japan. We have barred the gates but cannot hold them for long. The ground shakes, drums... drums in the deep. We cannot get out. A shadow lurks in the dark. We can not get out... they are coming.''..........

1947-Aus-pearl habour has fallen to the US, Brits press indochina.

1950- Aus - we have held them at bay for 3 years game ends AUSTRALIAN EMPIRE REMAINS !!!!

Plays as CanadaBuilds a ton of factoriesMakes a rather large tank forceHelps the US attack FinlandWatches the US run away as soon as I show upRuns out of fuel/suppliesGets routed by a horde of angry Finns

8/10 Its easy to get money and recources, depending what country you are, it can be hard, or easy to research things/ train a load of troops. But if you play as a small country, its hard to get a lot of people in the military, and you usually have to watch what techs you research, and be sure to at least research agriculture, and change some policies to get manpower.

Graphics

6/10 Unit graphics are good, counters are easy to read, most map modes are good, but the terrain one is bad.... its a grand strategy, it doesn't matter anyways.

AI

7/10 Somewhat good, it at times can make very bad decisions and do things poorly, other times, it can stomp things, and maintain whatever well. Some times its hard to beat, and a lot of the time, if you don't plan well, it can STOMP you.

Freedom

6/10 Compared to other Grand Strategies, there isn't much freedom. The time span is only a few years leaving little to happen (but the days are extended with long hours) The game is pretty much set. Its very difficult to do extreme things like changing history in a bizzare way, though it is possible. But all of those things aside, its still fun. BTW, I created a Soviet Poland and avoided getting stomped by Germany by luck.

Bugs, crashes and problems

4/10 Warning, there is huge problems here. The game is somewhat unstable, it will usually crash after some hours. It may not even start. For a lot of people lucky or not, it will crash, it will not start. There are ways around this, deleting files, downloading other things and such, but its troublesome.

Compared to other Grand Strategies

9/10 Hoi 3 is a great game overall. Its a gem, if it works. It is better than most Grand Strategies, aside from game breaking things. It will amaze you, but it is somewhat harder.

Overall

8/10 The game is great, recommend picking it up, but it actually is barren sadly, you have to get Semper Fi, For the Motherland, Their Finest Hour, in that order for it to actually be worth while.

I was a big fan of HOI2 and played it a lot. It had a good balance of playability and realism and there were some issues which needed fixing, such as convoys and the occasionally flaky AI but it was a good game.

HOI3, sadly, is not. It has taken me a while to work out why, but I think it's because, in trying to make it a complete war simulation, the developers have failed to either make it accurate or make it fun. The accuracy claim sounds harsh, so let me explain.

1 - Research. There's no logic to it. One has to seperately research the gun carriages and weapons for anti-tank guns, for anti-aircraft guns, and artillery. That's six separate thingies to research. Then there's a seventh bit for heavy AA for your provinces.Now in reality, what happened was that the best anti-tank weapons (British 17pdr, German 88, American 3") all started life as AA guns. It would make far more sense to have a 'foundry' option where guns could be researched and then applied to different areas. Why even force people to research three lots of gun carriages? It makes absolutely no sense.

The same applies to separate research for cavalry weapons, militia weapons, and infantry weapons. What, we're all using different rifles now?

As a minor aside let me come on to the logic behind the naming of each progressive unit. For example, the British medium tank starts as the A9 cruiser, then when you research 1940 tanks it becomes the A15 Crusader (skipping the A13), then for 1942 tanks it becomes the Sherman Firefly. What? No Cromwell? Why the Firefly? This isn't the only case of a total lack of logic in the choice of naming. The naming doesn't affect the game but for a game which boasts of its realistic nature it is totally out of place.

IMO the complexity of the research tree does NOT add anything to the game. I think it could have been halved in size and been far more enjoyable to use without losing any gameplay.

2 - Convoys. The problem with convoys is that there is no mechanism to manage their routes. This was a problem in HOI2 where the German AI could sink the entire British convoy fleet by hanging around in a few areas of the North Sea and continually sinking ships. The very least HOI3 should have had is a convoy management system. The player should be able to tell the convoy routing system NOT TO SAIL through certain areas. Instead I have to watch convoys being sunk in the middle of the North Sea and around the English Channel, instead of rerouting all my convoys to the NW coast of Scotland or Liverpool and Belfast (as was done historically). It's a huge oversight and it is one of the primary problems with playing as the British. One of the other problems is that the cost of both convoys and escorts is fixed and does not fall over time (as it did historically with Liberty Ships and corvettes). It's almost as though the game is written solely with land combat in mind and about 3/4 of the way through someone said "Hey, wasn't there someone else in WW2 beside Germany and Russia?"

It's a real problem and affects playability and the prospect of a historical outcome to WW2.

3. Naval AI. While I'm on the subject, the AI doesn't seem to know what to do with its ships. The Germans send their battleships out unescorted to hang around the west coast of England and get sunk. Which they do. A lot. It makes me suspect that the major emphasis for the game was on land combat and naval was not addressed properly.

4. Allies. In HOI2 getting allies to fight for or with you was easy. They often sent you units, and there was an option for you to take over their entire armed forces. In HOI3 that option doesn't exist. And they don't send you units. You have to 'set objectives' to get the allies to work with you. These objectives don't really work. So, when playing as Britain, Canada keeps its air force and navy and army in Canada. When you urgently need Canadian fighters to defend your airspace and Canadian destroyers to patrol the Atlantic, they won't budge. There is no way to unify command, so you don't fight as allies but merely as participants in a global war where you aren't fighting each other. It's poor.

5. Crashes. Oh my goodness, the game's unreliability is terrible. It crashes to desktop the whole time. To minimise the inconvenience of losing my game progress I set it to autosave every game week, which is the most frequent autosave setting. However, if you are in the middle of a huge amount of preparation for your forces (reorganising your divisions for example) the game might crash. This has happened a couple of times to me, where I've been playing as Soviets and have been engaged in a major reorganisation of my 300+ divisions, and the game has just crashed to the desktop, and of course the autosave hasn't kicked in because I'm not progressing time through the game. HOI2 never did this, and it's by far the most infuriating feature of the game.

6. Graphics and Interface. It's cluttered and it's illogical and it's poorly laid out and it's not designed to work on higher resolution settings. It's a bloody mess. And let's talk about the little pictures for each unit that appears in the research window and the production window. Apparently it was too much effort for the devs to dig out the pictures of the units that they used in HOI2. As a result far too many units, which had the correct photo in the previous game, have a 'stock' photo in this game.

There are historical oddities, too, ones which ought to have stood out like a sore thumb. It is now possible to build (assuming you have the IC) lots of provincial AA without expending any manpower. Who's manning all those guns? Historically Nazi Germany had to commit a million men to defending their homeland from bombers, and that was a drain on manpower. In HOI3, they don't have to. They had to in HOI2.

I could live with the game if it was new. If it had been out for a couple of months I'd say "Well, every game ships with bugs so I can live with it for now." But this isn't a new game, it's been out for years, and instead of fixing the very serious reliability bugs, and instead of sticking in a few dozen stock photos, Paradox decided that an urgent priority was some 3D counters which they could charge extra money for. It's not good enough.

I can't recommend this game. If it was claiming to be a beer-and-crisps wargame I could overlook its historical inaccuracy. It's claiming to be a very accurate game, and it isn't. It's not accurate enough for a historical wargame, it's not fun enough for a 'quick dip in and have some fun' wargame. It's too unreliable to be any kind of game at all.

This game lets you play as any country during World War 2. I played the base game plus all expansions (SF, FtM, TFH).

You can manage every aspect of the war, from diplomacy to espionage to research to actual combat. You can even try to stay neutral and sit out the fighting if you want, but what fun would that be?

There is an enormous amount of complexity - casual gamers beware! If one part of the war is too tedious for you, it can be set to be automated. For example, rather than personally overseeing every trade deal you can check a box and let the computer handle all of your trades. The computer is not as smart as a person and it can't metagame but in most tasks it does an adequate job.

Personally, I'm a WW2 history buff and I love to wrap my head around complex rule systems, so this was right up my alley. This is one of the few games I've played where I wrote out multiple pages of notes to plan my strategy.

For my first game I decided to play as Canada, which is a good beginner choice because you're safe from imminent invasion and have a decent (not overwhelming) amount of resources to play with. Just like history I joined the Allies. I sent troops to help France, getting my first taste of combat. I lost of course, but learned a lot and even got to stage my own hectic Dunkirk evacuation to get my battered troops out of harm's way. Later my rebuilt forces kicked the Italians out of Africa and captured Sicily. An amphibious invasion of mainland Italy failed, but when my British allies successfully invaded Nazi-occupied Greece I joined them and had great fun. By 1944 the Soviets had overrun most of northern Europe, with the western allies in control of the Balkans and Africa. I quit at that point, since finishing the war against Japan was a naval battle and most of my fleet had been sunk.

Next I decided to play a totally ahistorical game. I chose Brazil and decided to ignore WW2 and try to conquer South America. I built a huge army of militia and other low-quality bullet fodder, successfully overwhelming my neighbors through sheer numbers. Alas, my flagrant violations of the Monroe Doctrine had attracted the wrath of the powerful USA. Shortly after I captured the Panama canal the Americans arrived in force and their tanks proceeded to pulverize my hapless militia. Still, it was fun, and I learned about the importance of anti-tank weapons and combined arms.

My next game came about while fooling around with the espionage tools. As Germany I helped the national socialists win the 1937 election in the Netherlands. It was a huge electoral upset, sweeping away the liberal democracy and replacing it with a totalitarian state. Accusations of fraud and vote rigging were completely unfounded (tee-hee!). I thought, wow, this is so cool, I just changed a government! But the only thing cooler would be to actually play as this new government. So I saved the game and rejoined it as the new extremist Netherlands. I joined the Axis, but refused to join Germany in declaring war on the UK or Soviet Union. Instead I conquered a bunch of neutral nations, and acted essentially as a resource "banker" for the Axis faction, as the Axis powers are resource-starved in the mid to late game. What fun!

I've played many other games but the stories are too numerous to repeat. I'll just say if you like military strategy you're in for a treat!

I have a few criticisms. Despite the manual being 80 pages long, it wasn't enough. There are many things in the game which aren't well documented. HOI3 is even more complex than Civilization V, but it lacks the helpful "Civopedia" feature that game had to quickly look up how something works.

For example, in one game I was playing as Finland and planned several years in advance to declare war on Germany and then launch an amphibious invasion of Norway. I spent considerable time (years in-game, hours in real life) building up my fleet, but when it came time to attack I found I couldn't move my ships to Norway. After much puzzling I discovered that since the Germans owned a specific province that the Danish straights were blocked to me. There was nothing in the manual about straights being blocked, and nothing on the map to illustrate that they were. So all my preparations were for naught. Lesson learned: Save often! Or better yet, set the autosave for every 6 months so if any similar nasty surprises happen you'll be prepared and maybe able to recover.

My other criticism is that the supply system is dumb. For some reason ports and airfields don't stockpile supplies. So if you re-base your planes or ships to a new base you immediately run out of fuel. Even worse, all supplies are distributed from your capitol. So if you're playing as the USA don't be surprised when your troops in California start starving to death because their supplies are inexplicably drawn all the way from Washington DC (and each province the supplies go through results in a supply tax).

I would think the solution to this problem would be to create supply dumps at appropriate locations. Unfortunately Paradox's solution to the problem was to create an "Arcade mode," an optional mode in which all supplies magically appear wherever they need to be all the time. But this just creates new problems because a big part of the military strategy is about cutting off enemy forces from their supplies, using bombers to shred their logistics, ect. With arcade mode you lose all of that, so I ended up sticking with the default supply system despite its flaws.

Overall I recommend this game to WW2 history buffs and military strategists. Casual gamers should stay away though.

As a strategy game, it's wondrous; as a piece of software, I'm finding it to be problematic. The gameplay is deep; running through a year of wartime often requires dropping the speed several steps. Taking care to keep forces equipped with the latest weaponry and in supply range is difficult, but nowhere near impossible; if anything, it's almost pleasing to be both general and logistician.

The real issue, however, is stability. It's rare to be able to complete a whole game in one sitting, even as a neutral power that never gets involved in a war. Particularly when playing a major power, the game is unstable and prone to crashing. Monthly autosaves alleviate some of the frustration, but long load-times compound the problem and rob it of some of the entertainment value. The fun is bulletproof, but only so long as it remains stable.

Crusader Kings II might prove to be a better option for someone looking for a general strategy game; Hearts of Iron IV is listed as in-development, so I might consider that a better option if it turns out to be stable.

>Plays as Germany>Makes plans for world domination>annex Austria and czechoslovakia>attacks and annexes polan>Norway Declares war>laughs>Allies declare war>Sends all men to western front>Norway invades through denmark and kills my units their>Oh ♥♥♥♥ nigr.jpg>Norway with their one regiment pushes through germany and takes over berlin>gets annexed